The not-entirely-pure evil of "The Birth of a Nation"

"The Little Colonel" (Henry B. Walthall) performs a stupid and futile but nevertheless rousing gesture in Griffith's film.

In his December 2012 interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Quentin Tarantino notes of Thomas Dixon's The Clansmen, that it "really can only stand next to Mein Kampf when it comes to just its ugly imagery." To which Gates replies, "It's pure evil." As they continue to chat, Tarantino and Gates conflate The Clansmen with The Birth of a Nation, director D.W. Griffith's 1915 adaptation of Dixon's work, and Gates, after Tarantino avows that he doesn't use the word "evil" lightly, continues, apropos the film, "And a foundational moment in the history of cinema."

There indeed is the rub, and for as long as there is cinema, and cinephiles, and cinema historians, The Birth of a Nation will be maybe the greatest "problem picture" of all time, greater by far than The Triumph of the Will. While Riefenstahl's picture seems to us frozen in an unspeakable historical moment, its fascist aesthetics ever-ossifying into a species of malevolent kitsch, in the United States of America Griffith's vehemently racist vision is never not relevant, to use a word I'm not particularly fond of. A formulation I'm not particularly fond of either is the "what-we-talk-about-when" one; on the occasions it comes up, my reflexive response begins with "what do you mean 'we'?" Nevertheless, seeing how Gates and Tarantino talk about Nation reminds one that the movie's position as a film maudit is as singular as its position as a defining masterwork of epic American film. It is a film that literally cursed itself, by dint of the brutality of its racism; and the curse it put upon itself grows uglier year after year. 

Chatting with Gates, Tarantino extrapolates Griffith, the Kentucky-born-and-raised son of a Confederate colonel, as a man obsessed, and paints his obsession as an entirely malevolent one. "[I]t's one thing for the grandson [sic] of a bloody Confederate officer to bemoan how times have changed -- some old racist Southern old-timer bemoaning how life has changed, complaining that there was a day when you never saw a n--ger [sic] on Main Street, and now you do. Well, if he's just going to sit on his porch and sit in his rocking chair and pop off lies, who cares? That's not making The Birth of a Nation every day for a year, and financing it yourself." As if the entirety of the labor put into Nation was in the service of black subjugation. Tarantino has a vivid imagination, and a lot of general stuff going on in his head, but one might expect that, being a a filmmaker himself he could conceive that the day to day making of this film might not have been entirely a case of getting up every morning and saying "Time to get to subjugating the Negro!"

That said, I also don't expect Tarantino to be able to simulate a frame of mind in which The Birth of a Nation was actually NOT an effort driven wholly by malevolent intent, and I'm not sure it would be socially, spiritually, or intellectually useful for anybody to try to do same. Anyway, fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, we have a historical record from which we can discover exactly what such a frame of mind was able to come up with in defense of Griffith's vision. As in: 

"Today, Birth of a Nation is boycotted or shown piecemeal; too many more or less well meaning people still accuse Griffith of having made it an anti-Negro movie. At best, this is nonsense, and at worst it is vicious nonsense. Even if it were an anti-Negro movie, a work of such quality should be shown, and shown whole. But the accusation is unjust. Griffith went to almost preposterous lengths to be fair to the Negroes as he understood them, and he understood them as a good type of Southerner does. I don’t entirely agree with him; not can I be sure that the film won’t cause trouble and misunderstanding, especially as advertised and exacerbated by contemporary abolitionists; but Griffith’s absolute desire to be fair, and understandable, is written all over the picture; so are degrees of understanding, honesty, and compassion far beyond the capacity of his accusers. So, of course, are the salient facts of the so-called Reconstruction years."

I was thinking of doing an "anyone in class care to guess, put your hands down [names of critics X, Y, and Z]" joke here, but that would be too coy. Anyway: yes, that was James Agee, writing in The Nation, no less, in a 1948 obituary for Griffith. Too which one may respond, particularly if one has watched Birth of a Nation recently (I just did, on the splendid Kino Lorber Blu-ray disc presentation), define "fair." Because, man, oh man. Between the self-pitying resentment, the schizzy miscegenation paranoia, and all the other racial neuroses-to-psychoses filtered through overheated post-Victorian melodrmatic tropes (the building blocks from which Griffith constructed his new model of cinematic narrative), the prominent racial observation of The Birth of a Nation is "the only tolerable Negro is a subservient Negro," which, you know, doesn't strike me as "fair." And yet James Agee thought it was? How can this be? Note the care with which he chooses his words, and the note of ambiguity in the placement of one of them: that Griffith went to lengths to be fair "to the Negroes as he understood them" AND that Griffith understood them "as a good type of Southerner does." The ambiguous word for me there is "good." But inasmuch as these words offer us a window into not just Agee's head in 1948, but a sentiment that it was not entirely disagreeable to articulate in The Nation in 1948, so too do Tarantino's words offer a window into what "we" think, or may think, Griffith's attitude and intentions were. We see them only as hateful. We are literally incapable of extending the sympathy to observe that Griffith saw/understood blacks "as a good Southerner would." By the same token, as amazingly constructed as the Klan-to-the-rescue climax of Birth of a Nation is, we are all in a sense socially prohibited (scratch the: not "in a sense" or even "socially" prohibited; more like, prohibited by the strictures of human decency itself) from permitting it to manipulate our sympathies as it intends/demands. In his 1915 account of the movie, the poet and writer Vachel Lindsay says of Nation that is "a crowd picture in a triple sense." Discussing the climax, he rhapsodizes: "So, in Birth of a Nation, which could better be called The Overthrow of Negro Rule, the Ku Klux Klan dashes down the road as powerfully as Niagara pours over a cliff. Finallt the white girl Elsie Stoneman (impersonated by Lillian Gish) is rescued by the Ku Klux Klan from the mulatto politician, Silas Lynch (impersonated by George Seigmann). The lady is brought forward as a typically helpless white maiden. The white leader, Col. Ben Cameron (impersonated by Henry B. Walthall), enters not as an individual, but as representing the whole Anglo-Saxon Niagara. He has the mask of the Ku Klux Klan on his face till the crisis has passed. The wrath of the Southerner against the blacks and their Northern organizers has been piled up through many previous scenes. As a result this rescue is a real climax, something that photoplays that trace strictly personal hatreds cannot achieve."

Despite the eccentric undertones of his analysis, Lindsay, among other things, nailed why Nation was/is a "foundational moment in the history of cinema." "Real climax" is something greater than it sounds like, and it is not found even in the cinematic achievements one might be more comfortable with than Griffith's film. (As in, what if it was Feuillade's Fantomas? But it isn't/wasn't, and can't be.) Lindsay loves Griffith's storytelling, and his heart, so much that he seeks fo absolve him by trying to extract him from Dixon's vision: "Griffith is a chameleon in interpreting his authors. Wheeever the scenario shows traces of The Clansmen, the original book, by Thomas Dixon, it is bad. Wherever it is unadulterated Griffith, which is half the time, it is good. The Reverend Thomas Dixon is a rather stagy Simon Legree; in his avowed views a deal like the gentleman with the spiritual hydrophobia in the latter end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Unconsciously Mr. Dixon has done his best to prove that Legree was not a fictitious character."

It's very kind of Lindsay, but one need only look at the film, an uncomfortable thing to do, to realize that every frame of Nation carries the same level of conviction. It is very sad. And often very peculiar. From the prologue with the title card saying "The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion" to the odd formulation of Abraham Lincoln as the "great heart" who pardons future Klan founder Ben "The Little Colonel" Cameron when he's slated to be hanged for guerilla warfare and who, before heading to the theater to be shot by Raoul Walsh,  promises to treat the South as if it had never seceded, the movie's first section has these little rueful sentimental touches, not to mention reasonably powerful pacifist pleading moments, to give one the impression of Griffith as a relatively gentle-souled epic maker. Then, an hour and a half into a three-hour-plus movie, up pops the title card "This is an historical presentation of the Civil War and Reconstuction Period, and is not meant to reflect on any race or people of today.” And then, if you'll pardon the phrase, it's off to the races, with a couple of ugly citations from future fan of the film Woodrow Wilson, about "men who knew nothing of the uses of authority, except it insolences" and of "a veritable overthrow of civilization in the South." (By the way, did you know that Larry the Cable Guy is actually from Nebraska?) 

Here is what I wrote in my notes while watching it the other night: "Hey, remember that title card about five minutes ago? The immediacy of the images and the broadness of the performances pretty much wipes out THAT disclaimer. There’s really no getting round it: whatver the narrative necessity of setting these characters up as villains might have been, the execution of this can only be characterized as VEHEMENT." The film's quiet, sincere depictions of the privations the South suffered during the war, mentions of meals of "parched corn and sweet potato coffee," the description of raw cotton's use as "Southern ermine;" these now seem setups to rationalize the unrelentingly hateful portrayals of the likes of Thadeus-Stevens-pastiche Stoneman, smugly strutting Silas Lynch, "mulatto leader of the blacks[...]traitor to his white patron and a greater traitor to his own people," and whoever that black soldier is who chases poor Flora Cameron off that cliff. The dignified smiles of the blacks in the rafters of the House at the climax of Spielberg's Lincoln can, on some level, be understood as an answer scene to the repellent burlesque of the celebration of the racial intermarriage legislation in Griffith's film. But this, as we'll see, is maybe too genteel a reparation to the contemporary audience. The founding inspiration for the Klan is presaged by a lyrical picture practically out of Wordsworth, and followed by the proud intertitle statement "Over four hundred thousand Ku Klux costumes made by the women of the South and not one trust betrayed." Which may move an observant viewer to yell at the screen "Where did you crackers get the damn MATERIAL if you were so bad off?"

It's all terribly appalling, and yet you'd have to be an entire cinematic illiterate not to see and, yes, maybe feel the skill with which Griffith pulls off his to-the-rescue "real climax" with barely minutes to spare in the film's running time. A few years ago, the critic Terry Teachout wrote about Nation as a film that "has served its historical purpose and can now be put aside permanently," and avowed, prior to making that pronouncment, that it was also pretty boring, which was one reason WHY it could be swept aside: "Putting aside for a moment the insurmountable problem of its content, it was the agonizingly slow pace of The Birth of a Nation that proved to be the biggest obstacle to my experiencing it as an objet d’art. Even after I sped it up, my mind continued to wander, and one of the things to which it wandered was my similar inability to extract aesthetic pleasure out of medieval art. With a few exceptions, medieval and early Renaissance art and music don’t speak to me. The gap of sensibility is too wide for me to cross. I have a feeling that silent film—not just just The Birth of a Nation, but all of it—is no more accessible to most modern sensibilities."

This notion that the mean of "modern sensibility" as circumscribed by the critic is all that counts from said critical perspective is going to have to wait, and probably for a long time (see also Stephen Metcalf's immortal bit about The Searchers being "off-putting to the contemporary sensibility," oh dearie dear). But here's the thing: let's say that you are not Terry Teachout, and you do not process the film as bring "slow" but rather you apprehend both its pace and its overall cinematic language differently and as part of a continuum that continues to this day: in that case, whatever the fuck you think about early Renaissance music or what have you, the climax of The Birth of a Nation is going to "play" for you; that's the extent to which it is, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., rightly put it, a "foundational moment." But what, now, is its proper place in "our" construction of cinematic history/heritage. And while the fashion has it that Birth of a Nation is some form of evil, what is the place of Django Unchained as an "answer film" to Griffith? (Tarantino has talked of his ur-Klan comedic fillip in the film as his "fuck you" to the earlier director, who died a near-penniless alcoholic forgotten by the industry he helped create, so even if he were able to receive Quentin's flip-off, it is not likely he'd be overly impressed.) And also, why isn't anyone talking about the Klan as it's represented in Gone With The Wind? So many questions.

In any event, a film in which the protagonist dryly exults "I get to kill white people and get paid for it?" is pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office in these United States. Interesting payback for a nearly hundred-year-old insult, for sure. And a reminder that whoever "we" are talking about, "Give Peace A Chance" is not and never will be "our" new jam.

Comments

[Petey]

"But inasmuch as these words offer us a window into not just Agee's head in 1948, but a sentiment that it was not entirely disagreeable to articulate in The Nation in 1948, so too do Tarantino's words offer a window into what "we" think, or may think, Griffith's attitude and intentions were. We see them only as hateful. We are literally incapable of extending the sympathy to observe that Griffith saw/understood blacks "as a good Southerner would."

As an aficionado of US politics, Richard Russell is always a fascinating figure. There's a reason he's on a Senate office building, and there is much to admire in his national security career. But as Caro does a nice job of showing, he's kinda like a high Nazi figure, no matter how much of a "a good German gentleman of his times he was."

"It's all terribly appalling, and yet you'd have to be an entire cinematic illiterate not to see and, yes, maybe feel the skill with which Griffith pulls off his to-the-rescue "real climax" with barely minutes to spare in the film's running time."

It's a REALLY important technical breakthrough and 'first' in film history. (I always prefer Way Down East as a demo of DW's skillz cuz you don't have to deal with the 'problematic' aspects.) But you can hold the politics and filmmaking in your mind at the exact same time when you watch TBOFAN. There's a saying about how that kind of thing is proof of well-working mind for very good reason...

[David Ehrenstein]

The Ku Klux Klan was headed for the dustbin when "The Birth of A Nation" came along. It spurred memebership and thereby encouraged lynchings.

You can call it a movie all you like. I call it a murder weapon.

As for th "racing to the resue" climax, it' s pretty cute but have you seen "Argo."?

As for what his apologists refer to as "Griffith's real feelings" they claim "Intolerance" was his mea culpa for the frayed nerves and raised hackles TBOAN inspired. The problem i it doesn't deal with racial intolerance AT ALL.

Oh and one last thing, it went into production as "The Clansman" it was only after he showed it to a friend that he changed the title to "The Birth of A Nation" at the friend's suggestion.

[Petey]

"You can call it a movie all you like. I call it a murder weapon."

Movies don't kill people. Only guns and Zero Dark Thirty kill people.

[Olaf]

Let me express my deepest gratitude, Glenn, for this. I'm usually not given to gushing, but this is simply stunning as a piece of writing.
I would like to add just a few observations, as extra fodder for the intriguing discussion that inevitably will follow in the next few hours/days:
- I teach film studies classes, and it is nearly impossible to get students to watch BOAN; after all, it's silent, in black & white and 3 hours long. But just because society's definition of what is entertaining has changed and its attention span has decreased, does not make the movie less relevant for anyone interested in the history of film or race relations. We need to go on discussing it and its impact, as it will always be an important historical artefact with an enormous power to unsettle. (In my observation, the one group of students that usually stick with the film until the end are of an ethnic background - African, African American or Black British; they understandably react very emotionally to what they have seen with anything from incredulity to outrage.) On the other hand, the general public disinterest in any film that is nearly a hundred years old seems to suggest that at least the KKK which in the past has admitted to owning a copy of BOAN and "occasionally using it for recruiting purposes" is less likely to do so now.
- the horribly ambivalent feelings a modern viewer has when watching BOAN become even more complicated when one considers that without BOAN, there would be no "Intolerance". Can one cherish that great masterpiece without remembering why it came into existence, as an attempt to apologize for any harm BOAN might have done and to prove that Griffiths was not intolerant? (That Griffiths was shocked by the accusations of racism only shows how much he was caught up in his own thinking as a "good Southerner".)
- James Agee in 1948 not realizing how offensive BOAN is, could be seen as another example of an artist clearly being a product of his/her time; on the other hand, Agee is also known to have downplayed the racism he encountered when living with the poor farmers that were his subjects for "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", partly because he got very close to them and their plight. Maybe this loss of critical perspective is unavoidable when one is so close to one's subject, as Griffiths was to the endeavour of reconciliating North and South, one of the major reasons for him to make BOAN to begin with
- the whole topic of Griffiths using white actors in blackface deserves its own in-depth (psycho)analysis; all I want to do here is to point out that because of this bizarre casting strategy one single shot/intertitle unsettles the entire film: it's the scene with "White Spies disguised"; the film assures us that they pass as regular African-Americans simply because they are in blackface. Here the whole movie becomes absurd as it shows us white "heroes" pretending to be black spying on white actors pretending to be black "villains".

[Petey]

"Can one cherish that great masterpiece without remembering why it came into existence"

Like I say, gotta hold the two ideas in the head at the same time.

Revolutionarily innovative filmmaking along with perhaps the most repellent political stance of a major US motion picture in history. The Offspring's desire aside, you can't keep 'em separated.

As Einstein's equation proves, it's The Triumph of the Will squared. Times the speed of lightning.

[lipranzer]

Glenn, this is a good piece about a thorny question and film, but I'd like to raise two points.

Firstly, one phrase that always gives me the heebie-jeebies is "that's how they felt at the time", and that's particularly true when it comes to race relations. True, race relations at the time were, on an institutional level, much worse than they are today, but it makes it seem like there were no black public figures making a difference at the time, in film or elsewhere, and so much as I admire Agee as a writer and critic, I call bullshit on that entire defense he wrote.

Secondly, if BIRTH OF A NATION is problematic today in addition to how it is as a film (along with, of course, its technical brilliance), it's because the majority of works dealing with the Civil War, or the tensions that arose from it, portray the South as the good guys and the North as the bad guys (there are plenty of people who take issue with GONE WITH THE WIND's racism, for example, if not the Klan specifically). As you sort of imply, one of the nice things about LINCOLN is the corrective it applies to Thaddeus Stevens; you might think his portrayal in BOAN to be hysterical and one-note, and justifiably so, but what of the book "Profiles in Courage", which John F. Kennedy signed his name to, and yet portrays Andrew Johnson as someone of courage but Stevens in just as evil terms as (presumably) Thomas Dixon and Griffith did?

[Mr. Peel]

Very random thought: considering how Tarantino is friends with Peter Bogdanovich who remains the primary champion of Ford and also deified the opening of BIRTH in his film NICKELODEON it would be interesting to know what sort of discussions the two men have had about all this.

[David Ehrenstein]

Do try, ofyou can, to dig up a copy of "Film Culture" #36, Spring-Summer 1965 which consists entirely of Seymour Stern on "The Birth of A Nation."

[Oliver_C]

Someone tell Tarantino that Woodville Latham (he of the revolutionary Loop) was an actual, serving Confederate officer. Then he might start making his movies shorter in protest, and we all benefit.

[J. Priest]

FWIW, while there's no denying the technical skill displayed in the crafting of the film (the cross-cutting, the recreation of the Civil War scenes, etc.), the movie's reputation for its innovations in filmmaking may be inflated. The late James Card (former curator of the George Eastman House who specialized in silent film history) wrote a book called 'Seductive Cinema' in which he argues that "The Birth of a Nation" was more like a Rosetta stone in film language - it coalesced many filmmaking techniques previously pioneered by a wide range of filmmakers rather than just Griffith himself (much less, within "The Birth of a Nation" itself).

[Jason Michelitch]

J. Priest,

"Innovations in filmmaking" is the vague, shorthand way of describing the film, but its great achievement was always coalescing a narrative grammar for cinema. I think you're really just more accurately describing what it has always been less accurately celebrated for.

[spurious]

Don't want to impede this conversation, and great piece, Glenn, but as to the whole "good southerner" thing, can't we just let Faulkner deal with that shit? As in, maybe we should have a couple of characters, maybe one good guy and one bad guy, and let them hash this out, instead of just winding up a sermon?

Just sayin'.

[BobSolo]

I think QT protests wayyyy too much with his demonizing of Griffith and Ford for their racism. If the one fleeting shot in DJANGO is his "fuck you" to Griffith, then who is he saying "fuck you" to with the (frat boy favorite) Sicilian monologue in TRUE ROMANCE? We're clearly supposed to root for Dennis Hopper's supposed jab at Walken's miscegenated ancestry. Is this his "fuck you" to Frank Capra?

[David Ehrenstein]

As I was just saying --

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/argo/6609

[David Ehrenstein]

And now a few choice words from Hollywood's Biggest Racist Asshole

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturevideo/filmvideo/9794151/Quentin-Tarantino-says-Im-not-your-slave-as-he-refuses-to-answer-interview-questions.html

[That Fuzzy Bastard]

Oh no, now Ehrenstein is going to stupid up this thread too!

[BobSolo]

Oof. QT does a fair amount of stupiding in that interview...

[David Ehrenstein]

Selznick is quite clever in GWTW. A vigilante group that crops up in the story clearly is a stand-in for the Klan. But they don't wear hoods and blacks are not their target.

[DB]

compartmentalization - holding two opposing things to be simultaneously true - gets a bad rap a lot of the time, but IMO there are just some cases when nothing else will do and (IMO) this is one of those cases.

IMO BOAN is both great and horrible. It advocates many horrible things and there is no doubt in my mind many people suffered terribly because of the racist ideology it promoted.

And yet...

If nothing else it is profoundly important in film history for being a feature film that laid the groundwork for the 'formula' for all future feature films. Griffith was a great visionary and synthesizer, he not only came up with a more fluid form of visual storytelling in his short films, he then was able to make ANOTHER leap and design a narrative that would keep people in their seats for 3 hours (previously it was thought that people's 'natural' attention span was much shorter). There were other filmmakers doing long-form films, but none which came up with a narrative 'design' that sticks even to the present day.

Until somebody comes up with a new narrative form that supersedes the form that is predominant now (maybe some day "Satantango" will become the predominant narrative template), BOAN is essentially important just on that score alone and its influence simply cannot be wished away, even if for the best possible reasons.

Getting back to compartmentalization: a part of me cannot help but cut Griffith some slack. While I hold he was a certain kind of artistic genius, I think in many ways he was a clueless, childish idiot and just not very intelligent or self-aware. I do not doubt he was shocked when BOAN came out and he was accused of racism - I do believe he was blinded by the sentimental values of his childhood and was not really capable of breaking outside the box. Indeed, his attempt to silence charges of racism with "Broken Blossoms" is sadly laughable, as all it does is (I think unwittingly) play into ANOTHER set of negative stereotypes about Asian men.

I guess there is a certain kind of nasty comfort one can take in knowing how - like George in "The Magnificent Ambersons" - Griffith eventually got his 'comeuppance' in real life. Locked in his own particular victorian mindset, he was completely unable to adapt to the changing times of the post-WWI era and in time was completely shunted aside by Hollywood, unable to get money to make films. If memory served he died broke and alcoholic.

To an extent, I can cut Agee some slack too for his post-mortem. There are some genuinely sad things about what befell Griffith and Agee was not just trying to rehabilitate Griffith, he also had his campaign to cut through the shockingly sudden amnesia Americans had developed about silent films in general.

[Stephanie]

"Selznick is quite clever in GWTW. A vigilante group that crops up in the story clearly is a stand-in for the Klan. But they don't wear hoods and blacks are not their target."

The "political meeting" attended by the white men who bust up the shantytown outside Atlanta during which action Frank Kennedy is killed and Ashley Wilkes wounded isn't a stand-in for a Klan meeting but a Klan meeting (and there's a bit of dialogue regarding clothes to be burnt). Selznick balked at the glorification of the KKK in the novel -- reportedly forced on Mitchell by her publisher, but I'm unsure of that -- and thus doesn't mention them outright, but the unnamed group of men who've recently banded together "for our protection" that Melanie Wilkes describes to the confused Scarlett is plainly the Klan.

The attack on Scarlett outside of town, which provokes the vigilante action, is made by two men, one black and one white, and the shantytown is occupied by both blacks and whites. The attack is made by the Klan, even though they aren't named or shown in their getups, and black people are among the victims of the raid. Unless you're thinking of another incident in the picture that I'm not remembering.....

[Skelly]

It's also worth noting that Big Sam saves Scarlett in the incident that leads to the raid (at least on he film)

[Dan Coyle]

I'm now convinced that Armond White and David Ehrenstein are actually the same man, like Roger has multiple identities on American Dad.

[Jeff McMahon]

Can we vote Ehrenstein off the fucking island?

[Oliver_C]

"Why is David Ehrenstein doing this? They said when David Ehrenstein got here the whole thing started. Who is David Ehrenstein? WHAT is David Ehrenstein? Where did David Ehrenstein come from? I think you're the cause of all this! I think you're not-entirely-pure evil! Not-entirely-pure EVIL!!"

[NeilFC]

David E says:

Surely the facts aren't in dispute...

(wait a minute, that's not right...)

Oh Prunella!

(no, hang on...)

Clutch those pearls!

(that's not it either. Oh wait, i've got it...)

FUCK YOU TOO!

[That Fuzzy Bastard]

Dan: You're close. But that would be too easy. The truth is that David Ehrenstein and Lex are the same person, a plump systems consultant with a ginger beard and a collection of Warhammer figurines, living in Nebraska with his disabled mother.

[Petey]

"The truth is that David Ehrenstein and Lex are the same person, a plump systems consultant with a ginger beard and a collection of Warhammer figurines, living in Nebraska with his disabled mother."

Damn. I wanted to be the new Lex, only smart and a value-add, as opposed to dumb and a value-subtract. But I guess I don't really fit the profile.

-----

I find the best way to fight off Ehrenstein is to put him down with subtle wit. Unlike Lex, it is possible to shame him into backing off for a few hours...

[Tom Russell]

I actually don't see the problem with Tarantino refusing to answer the interviewer's question. He doesn't want to talk about it, then he doesn't want to talk about it. Instead of keeping on about it and about why he was asking it, the interviewer should have just moved on when it became apparent that it wasn't up for discussion.

[David Ehrenstein]

http://fablog.ehrensteinland.com/2013/01/11/quentin-tarantino-has-a-cold/

[george]

So David Ehrenstein calls Tarantino a "racist asshole." It takes one to know one.

They're both indulging in hysterical, over-the-top rhetoric, for the purpose of calling attention to themselves.